So this is what capitulation looks like. After swearing for months they would never surrender their party to the likes of Donald Trump, the Vichy Republicans (as they're called by the dwindling resistance forces) are worn out and resigned to collaboration.
It would take a Churchill to stop Mr. Trump now. And there's none within sight in the GOP. If he wins Tuesday's Indiana primary, all supporters of the #NeverTrump movement may have left to hold onto is the consolation that history may treat them better than their own party has.
Mind you, some still resisting Mr. Trump's inevitability as the Republican presidential nominee oppose him simply because they think he's not a true conservative. Not because he scapegoats and slanders entire religions, races, ethnicities and genders. Or because he is about as mentally equipped to discuss public policy as the Kardashians, with whom he shares reality-TV fame.
No, they oppose him because he supports health care for all Americans and vows to preserve Medicare and social security, the twin pillars of the U.S. social safety net. Because he takes George W. Bush's name in vain and thinks transgender people should "use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate." Because he is a New York liberal who's faking his reactionary shtick.
These folks obviously have no difficulty getting behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who, with his five- and eight-year-old daughters in tow, declared the other day that "Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree that grown men should be allowed to use the little girls' room."
That comment reveals about all you need to know about Mr. Cruz, who does not have room for a generous thought in his otherwise considerable brain, the latter being laser-focused on scorching the entire earth between himself and the White House. From the self-serving filibuster that forced the federal government to shut down in 2013 to his frightening demagogy in support of the petty North Carolina law requiring transgender women to use the men's room and vice versa, Mr. Cruz blowtorches his way into the cold hearts of angry zealots.
Former House of Representatives speaker John Boehner, who likes just about everyone, knows better than anyone how Mr. Cruz operates, driving wedges to advance his own ambition. "Lucifer in the flesh" is how Mr. Boehner, who last year gave up trying to herd the fractious House GOP caucus, refers to Mr. Cruz. He throrws in "miserable son of a bitch" in case there's any doubt about how he feels.
Still, for the remaining few establishment types who cannot stomach letting the Republican Party become a subsidiary in the Trump empire, doomed to a bankruptcy of ideas and principles, there is no choice left but to make a pact with Lucifer. Even the moderate Jeb Bush, who was humiliated into quitting the GOP race in February, now backs the S.O.B.
Mr. Cruz can't win the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination before the party's July convention. But Cruz victories in Indiana and a few of the other primary states yet to vote could still prevent Mr. Trump from getting there. Hopes for a multiballot convention from which a white-knight candidate emerges are fading. They could be extinguished entirely if Mr. Trump wins Indiana.
Most of the GOP establishment has already thrown in the towel. They're learning to live with the occupying force, help him "pivot" toward the November election and "look more presidential." Mr. Trump is playing along. He gave an actual prepared speech last week.
In that address on foreign policy, which he delivered using a Teleprompter, after having endlessly ridiculed his rivals and President Barack Obama for relying on one, Mr. Trump proclaimed that "America First" would be "the major and overriding theme" of his presidency.
It was geopolitical consultant Ian Bremmer who first slapped the America First label on Mr. Trump's foreign policy doctrine. He didn't mean it as a compliment. Such are the scary depths of his ignorance of history, however, that Mr. Trump embraced the label anyway. The America First Committee was an isolationist fringe group that opposed American participation in the Second World War, arguing that Nazi Germany was not a threat to the United States.
Mr. Trump gets branded as an isolationist for his criticisms of U.S. interventionism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The truth is his pronouncements on foreign policy have been all over the map, emblematic of the same scattered thought process he displays on most subjects of critical importance.
To him, Vichy is just a brand of mineral water.
Konrad Yakabuski